Reinforcement Learning-Based Plug-in Electric Vehicle Charging With Forecasted Price

This paper proposes a novel demand response method that aims at reducing the long-term cost of charging the battery of an individual plug-in electric vehicle (PEV). The problem is cast as a daily decision-making problem for choosing the amount of energy to be charged in the PEV battery within a day. We model the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition probabilities. Abatch reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithm is proposed for learning an optimum cost-reducing charging policy from a batch of transition samples and making cost-reducing charging decisions in new situations. In order to capture the day-to-day differences of electricity charging costs, the method makes use of actual electricity prices for the current day and predicted electricity prices for the following day. A Bayesian neural network is employed for predicting the electricity prices. For constructing the RL training dataset, we use historical prices. A linear-programming-based method is developed for creating a dataset of optimal charging decisions. Different charging scenarios are simulated for each day of the historical time frame using the set of past electricity prices. Simulation results using real-world pricing data demonstrate cost savings of 10%-50% for the PEV owner when using the proposed charging method.